Further and Further, Farther and Farther - Down the Rabbit Hole.

Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin asked the other day the question could the President get away with murder. It’s a question I asked in October, 1986, when snipers in the hire of the federal government wounded me three times with a rifle, shooting from ambush. I had already begun asking that same question as the result of repeated attempts at mugging, and I would have occasion to ask the question again in the years to come when federal “pull-toy” and “wind-up toy” operatives had rammed and sabotaged of my car, sabotaged my airplane, attempted repeatedly to run me down as a pedestrian and bicyclist, and used falsified police records and radio reports to incited trigger happy cops to shoot me.

Murder is severally defined; In order for someone to be found guilty of first degree murder, the prosecution must prove that the accused killed another person; that the person killed the other person with malice aforethought; and that the killing was premeditated.

Webster’s Dictionary, moreover, defines murder simply as “the unlawful killing of one human being by another, especially with premeditated malice.”

To kill with “malice aforethought” means to kill either deliberately and intentionally or recklessly with extreme disregard for human life.

“Premeditation” means with planning or deliberation. The amount of time needed for premeditation of a killing depends on the person and the circumstances. It must be long enough, after forming the intent to kill, for the killer to have been fully conscious of the intent and to have considered the killing.

So, by any rational or reasonable definition of the term, George W. Bush is a murderer. So, for that matter, is any soldier who is aware of United States and international law, namely that a principal reason nations declare war is to legalize murder. I know about these things, because the subject and its definition came up when I returned from Cuba in 1961, after having been sent there to kill Fidel Castro and/or Che Guevara. With no war having been declared, I argued then, I would have been guilty of murder, and guilty under the legal system of any civilized nation on the planet.

But the question is: can a President commit murder and get away with it? The answer is yes, of course he can. Basically, all he has to do is protest his “right” to do it. When you command the most powerful military on earth, to say nothing of a security detail like the Secret Service, you can do that pretty much with impunity – especially in a society as demented and ignorant as this one. For a parallel or model of how an indictment charging a President, especially this one, with murder would proceed, simply replace unwarranted – that’s constitutionally illegal – eavesdropping on private citizens with the word murder in the dialectic going on where the former is concerned.

Mr. Bush, as I’ve just said, would simply say that he has the power as President to do that. The decedent victim was a suspected – note that where Presidential execution is concerned, only suspicion is necessary – terrorist. The world would be better off, in Mr. Bush’s estimation, without him. He is a traitor (we ought recall that in the estimation of media whores like Sean Hannity and the rest of out administration’s Greek Chorus, anyone who so little as disagrees with the President is a traitor). And so on. Murder by the President would immediately become a partisan “issue,” and it would remain there. Too bad for the dead guy or guys.

Let’s not forget that another President also committed what feminism has referred to as “power rape” - that until their demigod darling William Jefferson Clinton became a perpetrator, of course. Then the crime became something else. That he also committed perjury as the result of his faux pas was excusable because the perjury was about sex. Substitute murder there, and see what you come out with.

The incontrovertible fact is that George W. Bush is the murderer of the eighteen women and children who were residents of the little border village in Pakistan a few weeks ago. To shoot into a crowd of innocent noncombatants, in order to perhaps kill an enemy, is at very least a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Res ipse loquitur – the thing speaks for itself. When death to innocent people results, with malice aforethought, the crime is that of Murder in the First Degree. The same applies, of course, to persons who become “collateral damage” in an attack like the “shock and awe” bombings of Baghdad, or the B-1 Bomber attempt on the life of Saddam Hussein by dropping four JDAM “munitions” on a neighborhood restaurant during the initial days of the war on Iraq. Collateral damage in an undeclared war is murder, by every definition you will be able to find.

It is also morally reprehensible in just about every society on the globe, from aborigine tribe to the Skull and Bones Society at Yale.

Then, too, the order given to U.S. States soldiers in the absence of Constitutional authorization and a declaration of way, the order resulting in death for any of the soldiers, is also murder by any of the definitions given here earlier.

But we bandy about definitions. Face it, folks, this society went down the rabbit hole a long time ago. I first realized that I wanted to stay as far from my fellow “Americans” as possible while still in high school. “Insanity in individuals,” observed Nietzsche, “is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” I remember having then read Lewis Carroll.

“Alice tried another question. ‘What sort of people live about here?’
“‘In THAT direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: And in THAT direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.’
"’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
"’Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’
"’How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice.
"’You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn't have come here.’”

I decided that I like to live with and in reality, “the road less traveled by,” in Frost’s poem, and, to continue quoting the poet, “that has made all the difference.” My fellow “American,” you live in a menagerie of psycho-emotional chimeras so bizarre, so nonsensical, as to defy the inventive imagination of the most gifted fiction writer. The United States and what seems to be the overwhelming percentage of its society live these days in a world of virtual reality unreality and psychotically irrational fantasy. This nation and society is a Jurassic Park movie, where mad scientist experimenters and their heroic White Hunter government protects us from Tyrannosaurus Rex bugaboos at a cost that dwarfs any of the monsters supposedly being foiled.

One can hardly decided where to start with examples, but having recognized that anything having to do with sex and the reproductive act is a matter kept by society totally outside the reasoning faculty, I choose it. This evening, for instance, we have still another episode of the Debra LaFave saga. In this segment of the national soap opera, a stunningly beautiful, 24 year old female teacher, has been charged – and now admitted – with having had sex with a fourteen year old male student, setting off a national discussion and debate that is enough to curdle the blood of any sane-remaining individual in its cuckoo-bird midst.

Among the first aspects of the debate was the gender of each of the principles, and what would be the case where all the possible roles reversed. What if both people had been female or male hasn’t come up, I note parenthetically – apparently that would too much muddy the waters where this scintillating example of towering intellect is concerned.

Feminists and persons with similarly warped powers of reason and desirous of protecting their Kafkaesque concept of sexuality have demanded that the teacher be punished severely. The survey of chat-rooms, blogs, and websites I’ve just finished reveals that the number of males willing to be similarly victimized by the pretty teacher approaches the ninetieth percentile. As one who happens to have had a similar experience, the woman being a forty-ish widow for whom I was baby-sitting (I was, as I recall, fifteen then), I have more than a little understanding and sympathy for that particular point of view.

During perhaps the height of the bullshit blizzard created by the info-tainment obsessed media, a famous attorney, Mark Geragos, let a cat out of the bag when he said, “Well, I had a case about five years ago locally here where I represented a politician's wife who was prosecuted for having, supposedly having, sex with the babysitter and an old-time lawyer, friend of mine, good friend of mine, still practices, said to me and I've never forgotten this, he says "How in the heck can you prosecute a guy or a woman in this case for something that every guy fantasizes about"? And, you know, there is to some degree that problem with these cases. If it is a male with an underage female, that's one kind of a prosecution but if you're talking a female with an underage male, and the male is over 14, between the ages of 14 and 17, there's not a whole lot of sympathy.”

Oh, yeah – that, Mr. Geragos, depends on which corner of the national rubber room you’re listening to. You’re still relating to the time when a woman “bestowed her favors upon” a male. That same rubber room has made it law that what is unreal and impossible is real and possible, and that’s all there is to it. The fact that the kid was having his dreams come true and the best time of his life means that he is being abused. Legally, that is.

There are literally dozens – no, scores of dozens – of examples of the same kind of mental meandering as that engendered of late by one sociological or political pressure group or the other, a disproportionate portion of which have been inflicted upon us by that Peyton Place of Pickwickian sense, Malaprop, and mental meandering, feminism. From that particular wing of bedlam’s rubber rooms during the LaFave and similar cases, we heard the stridently repeated asseveration that because a 24 year old male having had sex with a fourteen year old student would warrant a long stretch in prison, the same should apply in the instant matter. It’s that kind of cerebral brilliance that spurred me to decision having to do with proximity where Homo Sapiens is concerned. Whew! –Talk about never-never land!

Guys LIKE sex, ladies – just about every one of them, and at any age past puberty. And, yes, there is a double standard; girls get pregnant, guys don’t.

On any given evening before the prosecutor in the LaFave case dropped charges, one could hear the media’s experts and intelligentsia discussing how many years the teacher should get, only to be squelched when the word came that the prosecutor, faced with a defense having to do with the accused’s bi-polar disorder – continuing the surrealism of the affair, since that few could imagine how that had anything to with the crime alleged – had dropped charges. Mark Geragos, it seemed, had been right. That, of course, juxtaposed with news like the O’Reilly Factor and a discussion revealing how maniacal drivers who lead police on insane chases through residential neighborhoods, thus endangering dozens of lives and often inflicting severe injury and damage there, seldom receive anything approaching remotely the penalty being demanded for Debra LaFave.

The same, of course, was true on other evenings, where demands for sentencing in the LaFave, LaTourneau, and whomever cases were unwittingly juxtaposed with stories like that of a Vermont judge who handed down a sixty DAY sentence for the three years of molestation of a seven year old child.

And over it all, in a manner that gives new meaning to the term “obsession,” there was the media’s relentless exploitation of the Natalee Holloway case. In a nation supposedly dedicated to the rights of the accused and to “due process of law,” the leading lights of journalism like those of Fox News made an air-tight murder case against three young men on the basis of evidence so minute as to lack even proof of the supposed victim’s death. In my fifty years of assiduous study of investigation and forensic science, I have never heard more shamelessly salacious, lurid and meretricious, non compos mentis theatrics.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera – ad infinitum.

Has it ever occurred to you how anyone who would do this sort of thing thinks of their audience?

This is the nation of Schroedinger’s cat ethics, morality, and logic, where utterances by “leaders” from local to federal level leave the loonily led in abject confusion, waiting to see how both alive AND dead statements, ideas, and what-have-you turn out. That’s while they participate meaningfully as citizens of a democratically free society, of course.

Elsewhere down the rabbit hole, Social Security is an entitlement when Congress is talking, but not an entitlement when the Supreme Court is talking. The same situation exists in another score of dozens of instances, from the citizen’s right to privacy from government to the right of property ownership. In Iraq, we have an insurrection that isn’t an insurrection, and we have removed a bloody dictator by killing nearly three times the number we speciously claimed of the people we’re rescuing. We are sanctimoniously trying to establishment a form of government where it is directly opposed, and condemned by penalty of death, by the Islamic religion of the place.

Fit in there somewhere the fact that today a municipality or corporation has forbidden promulgation of the pagan Easter Bunny for fear of offending non-Christians. “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” But it will make you look good to anyone as confused as you are, huh?

Today’s news, as if to underline that fact, brings news of a Moslem who has been condemned to death for having converted to Christianity. You’re gonna make that kind of sober rationality democratic, are you? Sure you are.

Still further down the rabbit hole, our own Cheshire Cat-Mad Hatter – Lewis Carroll was a piker: we are able to produce both in the person of one guy – is spending hundreds of billions to first destroy, then rebuild Iraq, while his government dithers and can’t seem to find the resources to aid meaningfully the victims of Hurricane Katrina. More, having informed prospective social security recipients that the fund is rapidly approaching bankruptcy, the government approves billions more for Iraq and more war-fighting. If that weren’t enough, the president and his band of merrily merciless men now announces that such will continue the same for the foreseeable future, at least until 2010.

And finally, the keystone in this cockamamie construction, the Zacharias Moussaoui Affair. Here, federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judge struggle manfully to walk a writhing and shifting line between letting the defendant get off scot-free and exposing the terrible truth in a fashion so unequivocal that even the half-wit society watching won’t tumble. That the FBI was warned again and again – and again and again, by damned near countless informants and evidence – that terrorists were preparing to attack the World Trade Center has been demonstrated so often and so thunderously that the statues in the park are aware.

It is just as obvious that the government at the very least let it happen, and that all remains is to wonder why. That, of course is also very, very obvious. It may be that you have to have just a little awareness of the history of our corporate capitalist government – things like the Ford Pinto matter, for instance – to recognize the motive in question, but not much. The dog didn’t bark because its master would profit enormously when Silver Blaze was stolen – Sherlock.

How do I know you’re mad? You must be, or you wouldn’t still be here.